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Amazon Threatens 'Drastic Action' After Saks Bankruptcy (cnbc.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Amazon wants a federal judge to reject Saks Global's bankruptcy financing plan, writing in court papers the beleaguered department store "burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year" and failed to hold up their agreement. From a report: When Saks acquired Neiman Marcus for $2.7 billion in December 2024, Amazon invested $475 million into the venture on the grounds the retailer would start selling its products on Amazon's website and the tech company would offer technology and logistics expertise.

"That equity investment is now presumptively worthless," Amazon's attorneys wrote in a Wednesday filing, hours after Saks filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. "Saks continuously failed to meet its budgets, burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in less than a year, and ran up additional hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid invoices owed to its retail partners."

As part of the deal, Saks launched a branded "Saks at Amazon" storefront on the e-commerce company's website featuring a range of luxury fashion and beauty items. It also agreed to pay a referral fee for Saks-branded goods sold on the platform, guaranteeing at least $900 million in payments to Amazon over eight years.
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Amazon Threatens 'Drastic Action' After Saks Bankruptcy More

Amazon Threatens 'Drastic Action' After Saks Bankruptcy

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  • Amazon can speak up on money issues (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Thursday January 15, 2026 @01:25PM (#65926624)

    But Bezos is silent on the death of democracy, despite owning a newspaper that claims otherwise.

    • That newspaper announced sometime last year that they'd always be in favor of free markets and capitalism. Maybe they wanted to avoid being blacklisted by Trump, but whatever the reason, you can't hold them to what they were during the Biden years if they've explicitly announced a departure from that

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by PPH ( 736903 )

        The power of the government has grown too large when one is forced to practice sycophancy and kiss the ring of the reigning potentate. No matter which political camp you occupy.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          biden didnt ask for ring kissing

          this is shit conservatives say to justify their own bad decisions. is that what you're doing friend or are you really gonna stick to the both sides thing despite all evidence to the contrary.

          may as well be an antivaxxer too if you want to maintain that level of cognitive dissonance

          • No, b'cos that paper was already where he wanted it to be. As well as most other media outlets

            • Re: (Score:1, Informative)

              by Anonymous Coward

              pure weapons grade copium

              wapo and NYT and all the other "liberal" media was running negative stories on biden all day long, they couldnt stop talking about his so called senility at every turn

              also lest we forget the 2016 wapo column "donald the dove, hillary the hawk" or almost everything maggie haberman wrote, they have and continue to sanwash the admin whenever given the oppurtunity

              the idea these outlets are in the bag for democrats is actually republican propaganda and you all slurp it up like trumps ran

          • No, he just told everyone they had to enforce DEI policies that got me fired.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward

              You got fired for being a demonstrable asshole. No DEI required.

      • Oh, the WaPo is a total fucking mess now. It was pretty decent before Bozos bought and ruined it, kind of like Nazi Musk and Twitter.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Kokuyo ( 549451 )

          You username is total irony, isn't it?

          • No. Right wingers see everyone to their left as leftists, and left wingers see everyone to their right as right wingers. You're just suffering from your narrow perspective.

      • That newspaper announced sometime last year that they'd always be in favor of free markets and capitalism. Maybe they wanted to avoid being blacklisted by Trump, but whatever the reason, you can't hold them to what they were during the Biden years if they've explicitly announced a departure from that

        It was "personal liberties and free markets", AKA libertarianism for billionaires. And the editorial pages, not the news coverage. So far.

        Yes it was to appease Trump, how much more obvious could that get, the actions took place in February immediately after Trump took office. Right in line with the government suing news organizations and universities, threatening to block corporate mergers for personal favors, threatening broadcast licenses to attack anyone not nice to Mr Trump, restricting media access to

        • Since when has Trump been a Libertarian? If Amazon wanted to please Trump, they would have cast their mission as being in favor of tariffs, as well as targeted government intervention in particular markets, such as energy and semiconductors

    • âoeDemocracy is dead because the guy I dislike won the election and is doing exactly what he said he was going to do.â

    • Re:Amazon can speak up on money issues (Score:4, Insightful)

      by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday January 15, 2026 @05:04PM (#65927502)

      But Bezos is silent on the death of democracy, despite owning a newspaper that claims otherwise.

      He donated to and supports the darkness, 'cause it makes him way more $$$ elsewhere.

      FBI executes search warrant at Washington Post reporter’s home [washingtonpost.com] [non-paywalled article below]

      The FBI executed a search warrant Wednesday morning at a Washington Post reporter’s home as part of an investigation into a government contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials.

      There's no indication that the Administration tried other, more usual, avenues, like a subpoena, prior to getting the search warrant.

      Some people think this action is just a pretext to harass the Washington Post reporter, Hannah Natanson, and gather information about the numerous current and former federal workers talking to her. From FBI raids home of Washington Post reporter in ‘highly unusual and aggressive’ move [theguardian.com]

      In a first-person account [washingtonpost.com] published last month, Natanson described herself as the Post’s “federal government whisperer”, and said she would receive calls day and night from “federal workers who wanted to tell me how President Donald Trump was rewriting their workplace policies, firing their colleagues or transforming their agency’s missions”.

      Natanson said her work had led to 1,169 new sources, “all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories”. She said she learned information “people inside government agencies weren’t supposed to tell me”, saying that the intensity of the work nearly “broke” her.

  • Oh NO! (Score:5, Funny)

    by dmomo ( 256005 ) on Thursday January 15, 2026 @01:30PM (#65926640)

    A 2.5 trillion dollar company is losing 0.02% of it's value because of a bad investment. Somebody DO SOMETHING.

    • Amazon's presence has been an existential threat to other retailers, both online and with brick-and-mortar stores. Many of them have gone bankrupt.

      Saks thought they could still make it work, and acquired Neiman Marcus, ironically with a little help from Amazon. And now Saks has discovered they can't make it work after all.

      It's interesting to speculate whether Amazon is a major contributor to the failure here. And their complaints about it sound like a very tiny violin.

  • Amazon knew it was coming (Score:4, Informative)

    by CommunityMember ( 6662188 ) on Thursday January 15, 2026 @01:39PM (#65926666)
    Only a fool (and Amazon exec's are not fools) did not see the bankruptcy coming in recent times (the WSJ has had articles about Saks Globals situation for a while now). Once the bankruptcy was filed, they, like a lot of other unsecured creditors, now need to make their case to the judge as to what they might actually get (they all want it all back, of course, which seems unlikely, but you have to ask).

    • I dunno, I worked at Amazon for 5 years and saw some pretty foolish decisions trickle down from the executive pipeline during my tenure.

  • Is this a real bankruptcy (company out of business, assets sold off to pay the creditors some percentage of what they owe) or one of the relatively common fake bankruptcies where they file paperwork to say "we're bankrupt", the court stamps it approval and all of the creditors get nothing or very little, then the company just carries on doing whatever it was doing before?

  • Amazon can't even get Whole Foods right (Score:5, Interesting)

    by smooth wombat ( 796938 ) on Thursday January 15, 2026 @01:44PM (#65926692) Journal

    To this day, Amazon has not been able to integrate Whole Foods into the Amazon family. Their internal systems are still Whole Foods, not Amazon. That was 7.5 years ago. Here's how bad things are.

    I do a search for the closest Whole Foods to where I live. I select the link to the store site. My local store shows somewhere in another state. I have to manually select my closest store and Make It My Store even though I selected the link to my closest store.

    After doing all of the above, I search for a product while I'm at work. It shows available. I go home, a few miles from my work, and perform the exact same steps. The product shows out of stock. Not just on one day, but over multiple days this scenario persists.

    On top of all that, the product I'm looking for is constantly out of stock (once I've verified things are working correctly).

    I'm not sure what "technology and logistics expertise" Amazon was offering Saks, but if they can't get their own shit together on their own store, Saks owes them nothing.

    • The culprit for your "wrong store" problem might be 'ZIP code search', vs 'geocoded address search'.

      The largest ZIP code in the US is bigger than Maryland, and 'center of nearest ZIP code' can be a blunt instrument.

      Hard to say if that kind of failure is poor shop site design, bad database design, or a fallback from refusing to provide your location (maybe a long time ago and remembered/persisted).

      Could easily be something else, of course. Amazon certainly is one of the most mature shippers re: GIS. Whole Fo

      • The culprit for your "wrong store" problem might be 'ZIP code search', vs 'geocoded address search'.

        It shouldn't matter. If I select my closest store the least that should be done is select the same city as the store, not several states away from me.

        This same scenario happens with Lowes. For some inexplicable reason, it chooses a different state as my default until I change to the store which is literally, in the truest sense of the word, five miles from me.

        Businesses need to stop thinking.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by dgatwood ( 11270 )

          Businesses need to stop thinking. Only do what the potential customer tells them.

          This. When I choose a store, that is my store. If I choose a different store, that is my new store. If you can't figure out how to permanently store which store I chose, you shouldn't be building websites.

        • Dunno where your jurisdictional borders are, but you might be closer to another ZIP Code's boundary than you are to Whole Foods or Lowe's.

        • Also, if you're on a business network or a work VPN, or any of a few other situations, they could be assuming the location of your gateway to the Internet (so not a router in your house). One of my former offices in Georgia was periodically "in Texas".

          I'm not saying any of this suckness is OK. Just providing some of the failure modes.

          It ought to be better

          • Right. I understand when I'm at work it might seem I'm somewhere else. However, when I select the web site of the store closest to me, the delivery store option and the store itself should not be several states away. I've selected the store closest to me. Everything should be set to that store regardless of anything else.

    • Re:Amazon can't even get Whole Foods right (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sinkskinkshrieks ( 6952954 ) on Thursday January 15, 2026 @04:46PM (#65927412)
      The WF flagship store in Austin is a shitshow. They don't even have fricking PITA BREAD. Anywhere. They only carry "SKUs that perform" and optimize algorithmically rather than using any sort of common sense. And their employees inconsistently have terrible, unprofessional attitudes... I can only guess that Amazon/WF treats them like shit and selectively treats others like princes/ses, or their hiring, training, and company culture suck. As such, I do as little shopping there as possible and go to the very nearby Trader Joe's instead.

  • Only exceeded by the likes of Google and Microsoft. But Amazon is catching up.

  • What a stupid investment, esp. from a company that strives to disrupt retail.
  • I took a peek at the Sax store on Amazon. Lots of clothes that were as ugly as they were expensive. I guess I don't understand fashion.

  • it seems to me as if Amazon has probably done this plenty of times before.

    does anyone else think that Amazon is just pissed off that Saks wouldnâ(TM)t spend the money back on Amazon again? Itâ(TM)s the same circular scheme going on in the tech industry, and Amazon was trying to start it with Saks.

  • I guess Amazon is envious they didn't think of ruining other companies fast enough while evading debt first.

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